Prototyping

Amazing. We've already went through product development and a first round of design. But, will customers actually know how to use it and like the design? We go over our prototyping stage here and how we improve after customer feedback.

Yes! We’re now making real, tangible progress in the development of our product, and we can start to get more, real feedback on our progress so far.

We use a tool like Invision or Marvel to share our design with either potential users or a much bigger testing group. Here are a few great benefits:

Ability to create a clickable prototype: Testers can actually swipe, tap, and navigate from page to page.

Ability to invite a large amount of testers with just a link: We can invite a huge audience to give us some feedback on the the core of the app. This could be anyone from the internal team, to friends, or even actual potential customers.

Testers can comment on specific buttons or areas of the page: Instead of generic ‘this page needs some work’ they can show us exactly what they’d like to improve on.

We can swap out new slides of changes for the same testers if we need to change anything.

Feedback

We suggest for our clients to get feedback with the prototype at this stage. Sometimes when you stare at the UI/ UX of an app for weeks and weeks, you make little lies to yourself like “anyone would understand this”.

That’s why we think this is a great time for a potential reality check before we keep progressing and finish the other parts of the app. If the feedback is generally positive – we shoot for 7-10’s at this point – then we know we’re on the right path.

Here are some things we ask testers to get better feedback:

What’s your immediate reaction to this page?

We’re trying to pass the “quick look” check. Many potential users of a product will only give something a few seconds of their time, so we want to make sure whatever w’ve made makes an impact.

What do you think this app does?

We want them to describe the functionality of the app. A perfect response would be something like “I think this is like an X but for Y” OR “This seems like an AirBnB but for Dogs”.

Could you please complete XYZ? (the most important function)

Since our prototype is clickable the tester should be able to complete the most important functionality of the app. If not, then we improve on that functionality

What do you hate?

We’ve found this to be the most direct and effective way to get criticism. No one will say it’s perfect, but we also want to make sure the tester knows we explicitly want them to tell us what and why they hate something.

We also have the tester alk aloud as they go through it

We have our testers verbally say the things that are going through their head. We make them keep talking until they’re done, and don’t say anything even if they ask us questions.

We take all the feedback we’ve gathered and try to find the few things that people are all saying in agreement. If there is anything consistent that’s a negative, we revise in our second round of UI / UX.

UI / UX Round 2

Now we’re really moving with our design! There are two goals with our 2nd round of UI / UX.

Address anything that came up after the first feedback cycle

Yes, it’s not smart to always make changes after someone gives you feedback, but if it’s a consistent problem from multiple people, then it’s probably a result of us understanding the app so well that it’s hard to put ourselves inside the testers shoes. We take this time to fix whatever that issue is.

Start the ‘other’ pages of the app

By this time, we know what major changes (if any) we need to make for the app, so we can start working on the inner ‘other’ pages of the app. This could be pages like the reset password, settingss, How it works, etc.

Prototype Round 2 :

In our second round of prototypes, we will re-share with our first testing group, but also bring in a new group. We make sure we’ve fixed the first problems we uncovered during Round 1, but also go through the same feedback process as we did for the first group.

As long as nothing major comes up, then we keep moving forward and address any small edits that came up during the evaluation, or any other ‘other’ pages of the app.

Demo

Yes! We’ve completed our last round of feedback with the prototype, and we’re nearing the finish line for our design sprint. We tend to do one last demo with our entire team, the client’s company, the testers, plus a few alpha users (if applicable). We’ve already gotten a ton of feedback, but we’re just doing our last triple checks to make sure everyone is in agreement with what we’re building, how it’ll look and function, and who is end customer.

We’ll send out another build, and make sure no one wants any changes. Don’t forget! It’s very cheap to make design changes at this stage, but if we decide to re-do a page after we’ve coded it, then it’ll take much more resources.

Woohoo!

We’ve finally completed our UI / UX / Design sprint! We typically will crack open one of our favorite beers for a quick celebration. We don’t celebrate for too long, because now the real fun begins, development and customer acquisition.